At the tail end of the previous episode, Bobby obtained a key piece piece of information about the Leviathans' plans from Dick Roman's office, but took a bullet in the brain pan before he could impart it to the Winchesters.
Two parallel narratives ran through Death's Door - on one track we had Sam and Dean's race to get Bobby into hospital care and then their frustrating wait as the doctors' took care of him, while inside Bobby's head we followed his cat-and-mouse escapades as he tried to evade the Reaper (Henry Lubatti) come to claim his soul as he looked for a "way out" back to consciousness to let the brothers know what he discovered.
A theme of this season has been revisiting the backstories of the show's protagonists and even going back to plots raised in much earlier seasons - which gives a nice feeling of verisimilitude to the show.
Bobby's Picaresque odyssey saw him bouncing around his memories, confronting increasing unpleasant aspects of his life such as the final argument with his wife Karen (Carrie Fleming) before she was possessed and Bobby had to kill her and his turbulent childhood with his abusive, alcoholic father (Edward Foy).
To a certain degree this was powerful material, but it also felt slightly predictable with the only unexpected moments coming right at the end of the episode - and even then it was left hanging.
The scenes in the "real world" also didn't quite ring true, even though we had no problem believing the grief of the Winchesters at the strong possibility of losing this crucial father-figure from their lives - but given that these two scruffy looking individuals had just rolled up at the hospital with their "uncle" sporting a gunshot to his head, how come nobody called the police.
We've been told countless times on cop shows and ER that all gunshot wounds get reported to the police, in fact I'm pretty certain wounded Winchesters have previously avoided hospitals on occasion for this very reason.
Then there was Dean's verbal skirmish with Dick Roman in the hospital car park - people were filming it on their cellphones and wasn't only a few weeks ago that Sam and Dean (well, their dopplegangers) were the most wanted felons in the country?
Sure, the death of the dopplegangers lifted the heat from them somewhat - but surely someone would see this cellphone footage and say: "Waitaminute, isn't that that murderous dead guy?"
Perhaps all this is still to be addressed, as this episode began in media res and ended without a neat wrap-up.
But whereas How To Win Friends And Influence Monsters felt incredibly fast, Death's Door - while telling an important story in the lives of the central characters - felt quite padded and predictable.
Next Time:
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